Charlemagne 4th Grade

le 4 au 6 janvier 2023

Upcoming Dates

• Wednesday, January 4:  First day back to school for students
• Monday, January 16:  NO SCHOOL. Celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day
• Wednesday, January 18:  Choir club starts after school. See Mme Doyle’s note below.
• Friday, February 3:  NO SCHOOL. Teachers prepare report cards

From Music Teacher

Is your student interested in singing? This month, we will be starting up our 2nd annual Spring Choir dedicated solely to our 4th and 5th grade students. The choir will meet once a week after school on Wednesdays from approx. 3:05 – 3:50. Rehearsals will meet each Wednesday all through the spring, starting on January 18th, with the last rehearsal on May 17th, and the concert will happen on May 24th. Talk with your student to gauge their interest in joining the choir and be on the lookout for more information and a signup form from Mme Doyle (doyle_k@4j.lane.edu) soon.

What’s up! Quoi de neuf?

Please send your child to school in proper footwear and a water-repellent jacket when the weather is threatening. Students will go out to recess unless the principal decides the weather prevents it. If your child is ill, or has had a fever or vomited within the previous 24 hours, please keep your child home. Please continue to follow current Covid rules as well. If your child will be absent, please email both teachers (kincaid_j@4j.lane.edu and hopper_s@4j.lane.edu) and Bernadette (conover_b@4j.lane.edu) or please call in and leave a message on the school line (541) 790-7080.

Le français:

•We speak exclusively in French during French class.

•We write in complete sentences and can identify many parts of speech.

•We are learning the parts of the body.

No French vocabulary homework this week, but next week’s words are body parts. We began drawing a body and labeling all the body parts in December, so we’ll spend time in January integrating all that vocabulary.

We have completed formal cursive instruction, and we’ll be using it daily to continue to master challenging letters and links. We continue doing Tap’Touche French typing program once or twice a week. 

We are using this week to work primarily on writing in French and plan to continue to work on the most recent “J’observe…” writing project, “Une tornade de poissons.”

I finally remembered to ask our lovely intern, Lisa, to do a presentation about herself last week. During the presentation, it became apparent that most students don’t have much experience with the world map, so we’ll be working on geography in January also, leading up to our Francophone study unit in the spring.

Students should have brought their “Moi!” projects home the week before winter break.

Les sciences: 

We have nearly completed our science unit about Soils, Rocks, and Landforms, but will do a couple more finishing-up activities. We’ll begin our new unit, Energy (l’Énergie) in February.

Math

Unit 4: Decomposing & Composing Fractions for Addition and Subtraction

• We can decompose (breakdown) fractions in more than one way.
• We can use a number line or rectangle/ circle models to model addition and subtraction of fractions and mixed numbers.
  
• We can add and subtract fractions with like denominators.

Several students were absent the last few weeks of December, so we’ll spend a little time reviewing and wrapping up this unit over the next several days.  Students should be able to model and describe addition subtraction of fractions and mixed numbers with like-denominators by the end of this unit. Next, students will be modeling and solving problems where they will generate equivalent fractions.

English

Wordstudy:  This week we will analyze words with long /ē/ spellings. 

Literature & Writing: In our next unit called Extreme Settings, students will be reading science fiction, poetry, a non-fiction geology text, excerpts from a survival handbook, and an adventure novel. Students will look closely at authors’ development of character, setting and plot in fiction texts.

We begin by reading a short science fiction text called “Summer in A Day” by Ray Bradbury.  This classic science-fiction story takes place on the planet Venus Students will analyze the text to reveal how the setting impacts characters. Then, they will analyze the author’s use of sensory details (what can be seen, heard, smelled, felt, tasted) to create a vivid picture in the readers’ minds. Next week, students will write and revise a short descriptive paragraph to include sensory details and metaphors or similes. This will lead to a longer narrative writing assignment later in the unit.

Information about our new ELA unit can be found here.

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